
Class XHiakaL 
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COPVRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



MARGINAL NOTES BY 
LORD MACAULAY 



MARGINAL NOTES 

BY 

LORD MACAULAY 



SELECTED AND ARRANGED BY 

SIR GEORGE OTTO TREVELYAN 

AOTHOB OF 
"THE LIFE AND LETTERS OF LORD MACAULAY '' 



LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO. 

91 AND 93 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK 

LONDON, BOMBAY, AND CALCUTTA 

1907 



rL(3't*SV (•; CONGSESS] 

, OCT 88 saoi- 

J OopynitW Entry 
I Oct 2 ? / <? « 7 
I CLASS A HXc, WO. 

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COPTRIGHT 1907 BT 
LONGMANS. GEEEN, AND CO. 



ALL EIGHTS RESEBVXD 



MARGINAL NOTES BY 
LORD MACAULAY 

Macaulay's library contained many books, of no 
great intrinsic value in themselves, which are read- 
able, from the first page to the last, for the sake of his 
manuscript notes inscribed in immense profusion 
down their margins. He was contented, when the 
humour took him, to amuse his solitary hours with 
such productions as Percival Stockdale's memoirs, 
and the six volumes of Miss Anna Seward's Letters. 
His rimning commentary on those trivial and preten- 
tious authors was as the breaking of a butterfly be- 
neath the impact of a cheerful steam-hammer. "In- 
genious," (so Miss Seward wrote to a correspondent,) 
"is your parallel between the elder and the modern 
Erasmus." "The modern Erasmus," said Macaulay, 
"is Darwin. That anybody should have thought of 
making a parallel between him and the elder Erasmus 
is odd indeed. They had nothing but the name in 
common. One might as well make a parallel between 
Csesar and Sir C^sar Hawkins." "The chief amuse- 
ment," wrote Miss Seward, "that the Inferno gives 



6 THE MARGINAL NOTES OF 

me is from tracing the plagiarisms which have been 
made from it by more interesting and pleasing bards 
than Dante; since there is little for the heart, or even 
for the curiosity as to story, in this poem. Then the 
plan is most clumsily arranged :— Virgil, and the three 
talking quadrupeds, as guides! An odd association!" 
"What can she mean?" said Macaulay. "She must 
allude to the panther, the lion, and the she-wolf in the 
First Canto. But they are not guides; and they do 
not talk." 

The lady, who claimed rank as a Lyric poet, had 
published what she called a paraphrase of Horace's 
Odes without knowing a word of Horace's native 
language. Her version, which is inconceivably bad, 
was based upon an English translation by the Rev- 
erend Philip Francis; and from that time forward she 
always considered herself entitled to lay down the 
law on classical questions. "Pleasant Mrs. Piozzi," 
she said, "is somewhat ignorant upon poetic subjects. 
She speaks of ode-writing as an inferior species of 
composition, which can place no man on a level with 
the epic, the dramatic, or the didactic bard. Now 
the rank of the lyric poet, as settled by the ancients, 
succeeds immediately to that of the epic. She ought 
to know that the Latins place their lyric Horace next 



LORD MACAULAY 7 

to their epic Virgil, much more on account of his odes 
than of his satires." "What Latins?" asked Ma- 
caulay. "There is not a word of the sort in any 
Latin writer." Macaulay, who was a purist in spell- 
ing, took exception to Miss Seward calling a speech a 
"Phillipic," and seldom spealdng of a pretty girl 
except as a "Syren;" and he was always greatly puz- 
zled by the references in her letters to her collection 
of "centennial" sonnets. At length he caught her 
meaning. "Now I understand. She calls her son- 
nets 'centennial' because there were a hundred of 
them. Was ever such pedantry found in company 
with such ignorance?" 

It was worse with French than with Greek and 
Latin; and worst of all with English. "My convic- 
tion was perfect," (Miss Seward wrote to a lady friend,) 
"that you would all four be delightful acquisitions to 
each other. I might travel far ere I should find so 
interesting a parte quarrel " WTiat language is that ? " 
said Macaulay. He was soon to know. A year later 
Miss Seward received from her friend what she praises 
as a graceful and sparkling epistle. "It speaks of a 
plan in agitation to visit me, accompanied by Helen 
Williams, the poetic; Albinia Mathias, the musical; 
and Miss Maylin, the beauteous." "So this," ex- 



8 THE MARGINAL NOTES OF 

claimed Macaulay, "is the parte quarre. She did not 
know that a pariie canie means a party of two gentle- 
men and two ladies." Macaulay was at some pains 
to correct Miss Seward's grammar. "Come, my dear 
Lady, let you and I attend these gentlemen in the 
study!" That was Miss Seward's report of Doc- 
tor Johnson's words. "Nay:" observed Macaulay; 
"Johnson said me, I will be sworn." Miss Seward 
characterised some sonnets, in the style of Petrarch, 
as "Avignon Httle gems." "Little Avignon gems, if 
you please, Miss Seward!" is the comment in the mar- 
gin. "So the brilliant Sophia," remarked the lady, 
"has commenced Babylonian!" "That is to say," 
explained Macaulay, "she has taken a house in town." 
"Taste," said Miss Seward on one occasion, "is ex- 
tremely various. Where good sense, metaphoric con- 
sistency, or the rules of grammar are accused of hav- 
ing suffered violation, the cause may not be tried at 
her arbitrary tribunal." "A most striking instance," 
wrote Macaulay, "of metaphoric inconsistency. You 
may accuse a bad writer of violating good sense and 
grammar; but who can accuse good sense and gram- 
mar of having suffered violation?" ' 

* Macaulay was never implacable when a woman was concerned,— even 
a woman who could describe a country-house as an "Edenic villa in a 
bloomy garden." Miss Seward, after her father's death, gave a friend an 



LORD MACAULAY 9 

That will serve for a specimen of the manner in 
which Macaulay diverted himself with the follies of a 
silly author. A good book was very differently han- 
dled. It is a rare privilege to journey in his track 
through the higher regions of literature. His favour- 
ite volumes are illustrated and enlivened by innumer- 
able entries, of wliich none are prolix, pointless, or 
dull; while interest and admiration are expressed by 
lines dravra down the sides of the text,— and even by 
double lines, for whole pages together, in the case 
of Shakspeare and Aristophanes, Demosthenes and 
Plato, Paul Louis Courier and Jonathan Swift. His 
standard of excellence was always at the same level, 
his mind always on the alert, and his sense of enjoy- 
ment always keen. Frederic Myers, himself a fine 
scholar and an eager student, once said to me: "He 
seems habitually to have read as I read only during 
my first half-hour with a great author." Macaulay 
began with the frontispiece, if the book possessed one. 
"Said to be very hke, and certainly full of the charac- 
ter. Energy, acuteness, tyranny, and audacity in 

account of his long illness. "The pleasure he took in my attendance and 
caresses survived till within the last three months. His reply to my in- 
quiries after his health was always 'Pretty well, my darling;' and, — when 
I gave him his food and his wine, — 'That's my darling!' with a smile of 
comfort and delight inexpressibly dear to my heart. I often used to ask 
him if he loved me. His almost constant answer was, ' Do I love my own 
eyes?' " "Why," (asked Macaulay,) "could she not always write thus?" 



lo THE MARGINAL NOTES OF 

every line of the face." Those words are written 
above the portrait of Richard Bentley, in Bishop 
Monk's biography of that famous writer. The blank 
spaces are frequently covered with little spurts of criti- 
cism, and outbursts of warm appreciation. "This is 
a very good Idyll. Indeed it is more pleasing to me 
than almost any other pastoral poem in any language. 
It was my favourite at College. There is a rich pro- 
fusion of rustic imagery about it which I find nowhere 
else. It opens a scene of rural plenty and comfort 
which quite fills the imagination,— flowers, fruits, 
leaves, fountains, soft goatskins, old wine, singing 
birds, joyous friendly companions. The whole has 
an air of reality which is more interesting than the 
conventional world which Virgil has placed in Arca- 
dia." So Macaulay characterises the Seventh Idyll of 
Theocritus. Of Ben Jonson's Alchemist he writes: 
"It is very happily managed indeed to make Subtle 
use so many terms of alchemy, and talk with such 
fanatical warmth about his 'great art,' even to liis 
accomplice. As Hume says, roguery and enthusiasm 
run into each other. I admire this play very much. 
The plot would have been more agreeable, and more 
rational, if Surly had married the widow whose honour 
he has preserved. Lovewit is as contemptible as 



LORD MACAULAY ii 

Subtle himself. The whole of the trick about the 
Queen of Fairy is improbable in the highest degree. 
But, after all, the play is as good as any in our lan- 
guage out of Shakspeare." Ben Jonson, in the pref- 
ace to his [Catiline, appeals from "the reader in or- 
dinary" to "the reader extraordinary" against the 
charge of having borrowed too largely and undis- 
guisedly from Cicero's speeches. "I," said Macaulay, 
"am a reader in ordinary, and I cannot defend the 
introduction of the First Catilinarian oration, at full 
length, into a play. CatiHne is a very middling play. 
The characters are certainly discriminated, but with 
no delicacy. Jonson makes Cethegus a mere vulgar 
rufifian. He cjuite forgets that all the conspira- 
tors were gentlemen, noblemen, politicians, probably 
scholars. He has seized only the coarsest peculiar- 
ities of character. As to the conduct of the piece, 
nothing can be worse than the long debates and narra- 
tives which make up half of it." 

Of Pope's Rape of the Lock, Macaulay says: 
"Admirable indeed! The fight towards the begin- 
ning of the last book is very extravagant and foolish. 
It is the blemish of a poem which, but for this blemish, 
would be as near perfection in its own class as any 
work in the world." He thus remarks on the Imita- 



12 THE MARGINAL NOTES OF 

tions of Horace's Satires: "Horace had perhaps less 
wit than Pope, but far more humour, far more variety, 
more sentiment, more thought. But that to which 
Horace chiefly owes his reputation, is his perfect good 
sense and self-loiowledge, in which he exceeded all 
men. He never has attempted anything for which 
his powers did not qualify him. There is not one 
disgraceful failure in all his poems. The case with 
Pope was widely different. He wrote a moral didac- 
tic poem. He wrote odes. He tried his hand at 
comedy. He meditated an epic. All these were fail- 
ures. Horace never would have fallen into such mis- 
takes." That view is enforced in Macaulay's remarks 
on Pope's paraphrase of the Ninth Ode in the Fourth 
Book of Horace. 

"Sages and Chiefs long since had birth 
Ere Caesar was, or Newton named. 

These raised new Empires o'er the Earth; 
And those new Heavens and Systems framed. 

Vain was the Chief's, the Sage's, pride! 

They had no Poet, and they died. 

In vain they schemed, in vain they bled! 

They had no poet, and are dead." 

"I do not see," writes Macaulay, "the smallest merit 
in this affected verse, which I suppose was meant 
to be very striking and sublime. Besides, what in 



LORD MACAULAY 13 

Horace, like everything in his works, is excellent 
sense, is false and ridiculous in the imitation. It is 
true that the warriors who lived before Agamemnon 
are almost utterly forgotten, and excite no interest, 
while Agamemnon is remembered as Homer's hero. 
But it is not true that the Chiefs who preceded Caesar, 
or the Sages who preceded Newton, are forgotten. 
Nor is it true that either Caesar or Newton owes his 
fame to poetry. Every verse, in which either of them 
is mentioned, might be burned without any diminu- 
tion of their fame." Horace, again, made a fine and 
apt allusion to the old song, which Curius and Camil- 
lus used to sing as boys in the streets of Rome, telling 
each other that, if they did right, they would all be kings 
together. This was how Pope translated the passage : 

"Yet every child another song will sing; 

'Virtue, brave boys! 'Tis Virtue makes a king.' 
* * * * 

And say, to which shall our applause belong. 
This new Court jargon, or the good old song? 
The modern language of corrupted Peers, 
Or what was spoke at Cressy and Poitiers?" 

Bishop Warburton, with the partiality of an editor, 
thought Pope's version superior to the Latin original. 
"Why so?" asked Macaulay. "Horace refers to a 
real old Roman song which boys sang at play. Pope's 



14 THE MARGINAL NOTES OF 

imitation is only an imaginary allusion. ^\Tio ever 
heard an English boy sing that Virtue made kings? 
And what song to that effect existed at the time of 
Cressy and Poitiers?" 

Macaulay was fond of inditing observations on 
human character, and on the conduct of life, which 
have about them a perceptible flavour of autobiogra- 
phy. Swift had pronounced that discretion in states- 
men was "usually attended with a strong desire for 
money, with a want of public spirit and principle, 
with servile flattery and submission, and with a per- 
petual wrong judgment, when the owners came into 
power and high place, how to dispose of favour 
and preferment." "I doubt this," said Macaulay. 
"Swift wrote with all the spleen of a man of genius, 
who had been outstripped by dunces in the career of 
preferment. Neither my own experience, nor his- 
tory, leads me to think that the discretion which so 
often raises men of mediocrity to liigh posts is neces- 
sarily, or generally, connected with avarice, want of 
principle, or servility. Take as instances Cardinal 
Fleury, Pelham, the late Lord Liverpool, and the 
present Lord Spencer."' In the "Essay on the Fates 

1 These words were written in July 1835, not many months after the 
time when Lord Althorp, — in the course of nature, and to the infinite dis- 



LORD MACAULAY 15 

of Clergymen," Swift related the disappointments of 
his o\vn career under the transparent mask of the 
brilliant and unsuccessful Eugenio. "People," wrote 
Macaulay, "speak of the world as they find it. I 
have been more fortunate or prudent than Swift or 
Eugenio." Wliat business, (he then asked, in lan- 
guage of unusual, and quite unproducible, emphasis,) 
had such men in such a profession? 

Edward Gibbon, on an early page of his tlirice 
admirable "Vindication," explains his reason for con- 
descending to notice the attacks upon his History. 
"Fame," he says, "is the motive, it is the reward, of 
our labours: nor can I easily comprehend how it is 
possible that we should remain cold and indifferent 
with regard to the attempts which are made to de- 
prive us of the most valuable object of our possessions, 
or, at least, of our hopes." "But what," wrote Ma- 
caulay, "if you are confident that these attempts will 
be vain, and that your book will fix its own place?" 
Conj'crs Middleton, in the later editions of his "Free 
Enquiry into the Miraculous Powers of the Christian 
Church," remonstrated somewhat querulously with a 
clerical opponent who had called him an apostate 



tress of the ^Vhigs, — was removed from the leadership of the Commons, 
and translated, as Earl Spencer, into the House of Lords. 



i6 THE MARGINAL NOTES OF 

priest. "I do not at all admire this letter," said Ma- 
caulay. "Indeed Middleton should have counted the 
cost before he took his part. He never appears to so 
little advantage as when he complains in this way of 
the calumnies and invectives of the orthodox. The 
only language for a philosopher in his circumstances 
is that of the first great type of all reformers, Prome- 
theus: ' or, in Milton's words: 

'To suffer, as to do. 
Our strength is equal, nor the law unjust 
That so ordains. This was at first resolved, 
If we were wise, against so great a foe contending.' " 

Macaulay invariably marked his books in pencil, 
except four plays of Shakspeare, — Romeo and Juliet, 
King Lear, Midsummer Night's Dream, and Hamlet, 
— where everything is written with ink, in a neat and 
most legible hand. He used the twelve volume edition 
of 1778, illustrated with copious notes by Doctor 
Johnson, Bishop Warburton, Steevens, and other com- 
mentators, whose emendations and criticisms are 
treated by Macaulay with discriminating, but uncom- 
promising, vigour. On the first page of his Romeo 
and Juhet he writes: "An admirable opening scene, 

* "I knew beforehand the penalty which awaited me; for it is in nature 
that an enemy should suffer at an enemy's hands." — Prometheus Vinctus : 
lines 1040-2. 



LORD MACAULAY 17 

whatever the French critics may say. It at once puts 
us thoroughly in possession of the state of the two 
families. We have an infinitely more vivid notion of 
their feud from the conduct of their servants than we 
should have obtained from a long story told by old 
Capulet to his confidant, a la Frangaise. It is bad 
joking, but in character. The puns are not Shak- 
speare's, but Sampson's and Gregory's." Opposite 
the passage about the biting of thumbs is written: 
"This is not what would be commonly called fine; 
but I would give any six plays of Rowe for it." Of 
the scene in the street which begins with Mercutio 
asking, 

"Wliere the devil should this Romeo be? 
Came he not home to-night?" — 

Macaulay says, "This the free conversation of lively, 
high-spirited young gentlemen;" and, with referrence 
to the quarrel at the commencement of the Third Act, 
he writes: "Mercutio, here, is beyond the reach of 
anybody but Shakspeare."' When, on his way to the 

* The poet, (wrote Steevens,) appeared to have taken the suggestion of 
Mercutio from a single sentence in the old story of the Painter's Palace of 
Pleasure. "Another gentlsman called Mercutio, which was a ^urtlike 
gentleman, very well beloved of aU men, and, by reason of his pleasant 
and courteous behaviour, in all companies well entertained." "Shak- 
speare," said Macaulay, "was just the man to ex-pand a hint like this. 
How much he has made of Thersites, who is nothing in Homer!" 



i8 THE MARGINAL NOTES OF 

ball-room, Romeo tells Benvolio that his mind misgives 

"Some consequence, yet hanging in the stars, 
Shall bitterly begin his fearful date 
With this night's revels," 

Macaulay \vrites: "This as fine an instance of pre- 
sentiment as I remember in poetry. It throws a sad- 
ness over all the gaiety that follows, and prepares us 
for the catastrophe." At the close of the Third Act 
he says: "Very fine is the way in which Juliet at once 
withdraws her whole confidence from the nurse with- 
out disclosing her feelings;" and when, in the ensu- 
ing scene, the poor child commits her life to the hands 
of Friar Lawrence, Macaulay remarks on the wonder- 
ful genius with which the poet dehneates a timid, deli- 
cate, girl of fourteen excited and exalted to an act of 
desperate courage. The respect which he paid to 
Shakspeare, and to Shakspeare's creations, was very 
seldom extended to Shakspeare's commentators. 

"Now, afore God, this reverend holy friar 
All our whole city is much bound to him." 

"Warburton," writes Macaulay, "proposed to read 
'hymn' for 'him'; — the most ludicrous emendation 
ever suggested." 

Of the actor's favourite passage, about Queen 



LORD MACAULAY 19 

Mab and her doings, Macaulay says: "This speech, 
— full of matter, of thought, of fancy, as it is, — seems 
to me, like much of this play, to be not in Shakspeare's 
very best manner. It is stuck on like one of Horace's 
'purple patches.' It does not seem to spring natu- 
rally out of the conversation. This is a fault which, 
in his finest works, Shakspeare never commits." "I 
think Romeo and Juliet," (such was Macaulay's ulti- 
mate conclusion,) "is the play in which Shakspeare's 
best and worst modes of writing are exhibited in the 
closest ju.xtaposition. If we knew the precise order 
in which his pieces followed each other, I am per- 
suaded that we should find that this play was the turn- 
ing point in the history of that most wonderful and 
sublime genius. The comic part is almost uniformly 
good. His comic manner attained perfection earUer 
than his tragic manner. There are passages in Romeo 
and Juliet equal to anything in Lear or Othello; but 
there are also very many passages as poor as anything 
in Love's Labour Lost. Arimanes and Oromasdes 
were fighting for him. At last Oromasdes had him all 
to himself." I well remember how my uncle, in one 
of his very few conversations which I can clearly re- 
call, bade me observe the contrast between Juliet's 
reception of what she supposes to be Romeo's death, 



20 THE MARGINAL NOTES OF 

and Romeo's reception of the report of the death of 
Juliet. He quoted to me, in something of a disparag- 
ing and ironical tone, the lines: 

"Hath Romeo slain himself? Say thou but 'I,' 
And that bare vowel 'I' shall poison more 
Than the death-darting eye of cockatrice. 
I am not I, if there be such an I; 
Or those eyes shut, that make thee answer ' I.' " 

Opposite these five lines I now find written: "If this 
had been in Cibber, Gibber would never have heard 
the last of it." And then he recited, with energy and 
solemn feeling, the First Scene of the Fifth Act. I 
can still hear his voice as he pronounced the words: 

"Is it even so? Then I defy you, stars! — 
Thou know'st my lodging. Get me ink and paper. 
And hire post-horses. I will hence to-night." 

At the point where Balthazar brings the evil tidings 
to Mantua, Macaulay has written: "Here begins a 
noble series of scenes. I know nothing grander than 
the way in which Romeo hears the news. It moves 
me even more than Lear's agonies." Of the closing 
passage in the vault of death he says: "The desperate 
calmness of Romeo is sublime beyond expression ; and 
the manner in which he is softened into tenderness 



LORD MACAULAY 21 

when he sees the body of JuHet is perhaps the most 
affecting touch in all poetry."' 

"I believe," said Macaulay, "that Hamlet was the 
only play on which Shakspeare really bestowed much 
care and attention." Macaulay himself devoted to 
the examination of that drama as «much time and 
thought as if it had been his intention to edit it. It 
would be superfluous to re-produce the eloquent ex- 
pressions of unreserved admiration with which the 
margin of almost every page is thickly studded. They 
were written for Macaulay's own satisfaction, and the 
world can appreciate Hamlet without their aid; but it 
may not be amiss to present a few specimens of his 
literary and ethical comments. He regarded the 
dramatic style of the opening dialogue as "beyond 
praise;" and he applied the unwonted epithet of 
"sweet writing" to the passage describing the peace 
and calm in which the natural world is steeped when 



' "O, my love! my wife! 
Death, that hath sucked the honey of thy breath, 
Hath had no power yet upon thy beauty. 
Thou art not conquered. Beauty's ensign yet 
Is crimson in thy lips, and in thy cheeks; , 
And death's pale flag is not advanced there." 

"His comic scenes," (so Johnson wTote in his review of Romeo and Juliet,) 
"are happily wrought; but his pathetic strains are always polluted by some 
unexpected depravation." "Surely not always!" said Macaulay. "The 
first scenes of the fifth act are as near perfection as any ever written." 



22 THE MARGINAL NOTES OF 

"that season comes 
Wherein our Saviour's birth is celebrated." 

In the middle of the same scene came something 
which pleased him less. "The long story," he said, 
"about Fortinbras, and all that follows from it, seems 
to me to be a clumsy addition to the plot." Of the 
royal audience in the room of state, which immedi- 
ately follows, Macaulay writes: "The silence of Ham- 
let during the earher part of this scene is very fine, but 
not equal to the silence of Prometheus and Cassandra 
in the Prometheus and Agamemnon of ^schylus." 
In the Third scene of the same Act, "There is," he 
says, "perhaps a little too much extension given to 
the talk of Laertes and Ophelia, though many lines 
have great merit. But Shakspeare meant to exhibit 
them in the free intercourse of perfect confidence and 
affection, in order that the subsequent distress of 
Laertes might be more fully comprehended. This is 
a common practice with him, and explains many pas- 
sages which seem, at first sight, incongruous addi- 
tions to his best plays." With regard to the strolling 
player's declamation about Pyrrhus, Macaulay holds 
that "the only thing deserving of much admiration in 
the speech is the manner in which it is raised above 
the ordinary diction which surrounds it. It is poetry 



LORD MACAULAY 23 

within poetry, — a play within a play. It was therefore 
proper to make its language bear the same relation to 
the language, in which Hamlet and Horatio talk, which 
the language of Hamlet and Horatio bears to the com- 
mon style of conversation among gentlemen. This is 
a sufficient defence of the style, which is undoubtedly 
in itself far too turgid for dramatic, or even for lyric, 
composition." 

The opening of the Fourth Scene in the First Act, 
on the platform of the Castle at Elsinore, suggests these 
reflections to Macaulay. "Nothing can be finer than 
this specimen of Hamlet's pecuHar character. His 
intellect is out of all proportion to his will or his pas- 
sions. Under the most exciting circumstances, while 
expecting every moment to see the ghost of his father 
rise before him, he goes on discussing questions of 
morals, manners, or politics, as if he were in the schools 
of Wittenberg." Of the address to Horatio, in the 
Third Act,— 

"Dost thou hear? 
Since my dear soul was mistress of her choice, 
And could of men distinguish, her election 
Hath sealed thee for herself," — 

Macaulay writes: "An exquisitely beautiful scene. 
It always moved me more than any other in the play. 



24 THE MARGINAL NOTES OF 

There is something very striking in the way in which 
Hamlet, — a man of a gentle nature, quick in specula- 
tion, morbidly sluggish in action, unfit to struggle with 
the real evils of life, and finding himself plunged into 
the midst of them, — delights to repose on the strong 
mind of a man who had been severely tried, and who 
had learned stoicism from experience. There is won- 
derful truth in this." The marginal note about the 
conversation between Hamlet and the courtier, in the 
Fifth Act, runs as follows: "This is a most admirable 
scene. The fooling of Osric is nothing; but it is most 
striking to see how completely Hamlet forgets his 
father, his mistress, the terrible duty imposed upon 
him, the imminent danger which he has to run, as 
soon as a subject of observation comes before him; — 
as soon as a good butt is offered to his vdt. The 
ghost of his father finds him speculating on the causes 
of the decline of the fame of Denmark. Immediately 
before he puts his uncle's conscience to the decisive 
test, he reads a lecture on the principles of dramatic 
composition and representation. And now, just after 
Ophelia's burial, he is analysing and describing the 
fashionable follies of the age, with as much apparent 
ease of heart as if he had never known sorrow." 

Macaulay had much to say about the editors of 



LORD MACAULAY 25 

Hamlet. Two lines of the most famous soliloquy in 
the world were printed thus in his copy of Shakspeare : 

"Who would fardels bear, 
To groan and sweat under a weary life?" 

To this passage Doctor Johnson had appended the 
following note. "All the old copies have to 'grunt 
and sweat.' It is undoubtedly the true reading, but 
can scarcely be borne by modem ears." "We want 
Shakspeare," said Macaulay, "not your fine modem 
English." Warburton had amended the words of 
Hamlet, "For if the sun breeds maggots in a dead dog, 
being a good kissing carrion," — by substituting "god" 
for "good." "This," said Doctor Johnson, "is a 
noble emendation which almost sets the critic above 
the author." "It is," wrote Macaulay, "a noble 
emendation. Had Warburton often hit off such cor- 
rections, he would be entitled to the first place among 
critics." When Hamlet declined to kill his uncle in 
the act of praying, on the ground that he would go 
straight to heaven. Doctor Johnson pronounced that 
the speech in which "not content with taking blood 
for blood, he contrived damnation for liis enemy, was 
too horrible to be read or uttered." "Johnson," said 
Macaulay, "docs not understand the character. 
Hamlet is irresolute: and he makes the first excuse 



26 THE MARGINAL NOTES OF 

that suggests itself for not striking. If he had met the 
King drunk, he would have refrained from avenging 
himself lest he should kill both soul and body." 

Macaulay gave to King Lear as close a study as to 
Hamlet, and he was moved by it even more profoundly. 
Before the Third Scene of the First Act he writes: 
"Here begins the finest of all human performances." 
He judged Shakspeare's Lear by what to him was a 
very high standard of comparison, — the masterpieces 
of that Attic Tragedy which, for several years together, 
he used to read through, from end to end, yearly. In 
the Second Scene of the Second Act, opposite Corn- 
wall's description of the fellow who has been praised 
for bluntness, he writes: "Excellent! It is worth 
while to compare these moral speeches of Shakspeare 
with those which are so much admired in Euripides. 
The superiority of Shakspeare's observations is im- 
mense. But the dramatic art with which they are 
introduced, — always in the right place, — always from 
the right person, — is still more admirable." When 
Lear despatches Gloucester on a second message to 
Regan and her husband, — 

"The King would speak with Cornwall. The dear 
father 



LORD MACAULAY 27 

Would with his daughter speak; commands her 

service. 
Are they informed of this?"— 

Macaulay pronounces the passage superior to any 
speech of passion in the Greek Drama. He observes 
how the nonsense of the poor fool about the eels and 
the buttered hay, "coming in between the bursts of the 
King's agony, heightens the effect beyond description." 
And of the appeal to Goneril in the same scene, — 

"Now I pr'ythee, daughter, do not make me mad! 
I will not trouble thee, my cliild; farewell!" 

he says, "This last struggle between rage and tender- 
ness is, I think, unequalled in poetry." When the 
outraged father breaks forth into the terrible apos- 
trophe commencing 

"O, let not women's weapons, water-drops, 
Stain my man's cheeks!" 

Macaulay writes, "Where is there anything like this 
in the world?" 

If my uncle had been composing literary criticism 
for the Edinburgh Review he would have been more 
frugal of his superlatives. But these spontaneous and 
unstudied expressions of admiration will have a value 
of their own for those who love great poetry, as indi- 



28 THE MARGINAL NOTES OF 

eating the awe and emotion produced upon an im- 
pressionable mind, of exceptional power, by the loftiest 
work of mankind's finest genius. There is ample 
proof in every act and scene of King Lear that Macau- 
lay's judgment was not asleep, and that his praise was 
guided by discrimination. With regard to the open- 
ing of the play he writes: "Idolising Shakspeare as I 
do, I cannot but feel that the whole scene is very un- 
natural. He took it, to be sure, from an old story. 
What miracles his genius has brought out from mate- 
rials so unpromising!" Of the quarrel between Kent 
and Cornwall's steward he says: "It is rather a fault 
in the play, to my thinking, that Kent should behave 
so very insolently in this scene. A man of his rank and 
sense should have had more self-command and dig- 
nity even in lais anger. One can hardly blame Corn- 
wall for putting him in the stocks." "Albany," said 
Macaulay, "is very slightly touched; yet, with an art 
peculiar to Shakspeare, quite enough to give us a 
very good idea of the man ; — amiable, and not deficient 
in spirit, but borne down by the violent temper of a 
wife who has brought him an immense dowry. Corn- 
wall is, like Albany, slightly touched, but with wonder- 
ful skill. No poet ever made such strong likenesses 
with so few strokes." In the Fourth Scene of the 



LORD MACAULAY 29 

Third Act, where Lear insists that his two followers 
should seek cover from the storm, Macaulay writes; 
"The softening of Lear's nature and manners, under 
the discipline of severe sorrow, is most happily marked 
in several places;" and, where Edgar issues from the 
hovel, attention is called to the wonderful contrast 
between the feigned madman, and the King whose 
brain is beginning to turn in earnest. Doctor John- 
son, at the end of the play, made a solemn protest 
against the unpleasing character of a story, "in which 
the wicked prosper, and the virtuous miscarry." Ma- 
caulay did not concur in the verdict. "There is 
nothing," he wrote, "hke this last scene in the world. 
Johnson talks nonsense. Tom to pieces as Lear's 
heart had been, was he to live happily ever after, as 
the story-books say? Wonderful as the whole play 
is, this last passage is the triumph of Shakspeare's 
genius. Every character is perfectly supported." 

Macaulay reckoned Othello the best play extant 
in any language ; but it shows none of his pencil marks. 
It may well be that he had ceased reading it, because 
he knew the whole of it by heart.' The specimens 

'Macaulay did not affect to underrate the extraordinary strength of 
his memor)-. Bishop Monk wrote of Dr. Bentley: "In the faculty of 
memory he has himself candidly declared that he was not particularly 
gifted." "I do not think much of this declaration," said Macaulay. "It 



30 THE MARGINAL NOTES OF 

which have already been given of his annotations suf- 
ficiently illustrate the spirit in which he always read 
his poet. Everywhere may be found the same rever- 
ential delight in Shakspeare, and the same disrespect- 
ful attitude towards Shakspeare's commentators. 
When, in Antony and Cleopatra, a cloud is likened to 
a bear or a lion, a castle or a mountain, Steevens con- 
sidered himself bound to make this observation. 
"Perhaps Shakspeare received the thought from the 
Second Book of Holland's translation of Pliny's Nat- 
ural History: 'In one place there appeareth the re- 
semblance of a waine or a chariot; in another of 
a beare.'" "Solemn nonsense!" said Macaulay. 
"Had Shakspeare no eyes to see the sky with?" 
When the poet, in the Prologue to Henry the Fifth, 
asks: 

"Can this cock-pit hold 
The vasty field of France ? Or may we cram 
Within this wooden O the very casques 
That did affright the air at Agincourt?" 

shows no candour, for people are rather vain than ashamed of the badness 
of their memories. I have known people, who had excellent memories) 
use the same sort of language. They reason thus, The less memor)', the 
more invention. Congreve makes Mirabell say something of this sort." 
The passage which was in Macaulay's mind may be found in the Way of 
the World, Act I., Scene 6. 

" Wilwoud. No, but prithee e.tcuse me. My memory is such a memory. 

Mirabell. Have a care of such apologies, Witwoud; for I never knew 
a fool but he affected to complain, either of the spleen or his memor)'." 



LORD MACAULAY 31 

Johnson remarks that to call a circle an O was a very 
mean metaphor. "Surely," wrote Macaulay, "if O 
were really the usual name of a circle there would be 
nothing mean in it any more than in the Delta of the 
Nile." The talk at the Boar's Head Tavern between 
Prince Hal, and Francis the drawer, according to 
Doctor Johnson, "may entertain on the stage, but 
affords not much delight to the reader." "It is an 
excellent scene, by your leave, Doctor:" is Macaulay's 
rejoinder. Warburton pronounced the first line of 
the Fool's prophecy, in the Third Act of King Lear, 
to be corrupt. "Or ere I go," he says, "is not Eng- 
lish." "Warburton," (wrote Macaulay,) "had for- 
gotten his Psalter, 'Or ever your pots be made hot 
with thorns.' And in the Book of Daniel, 'Or ever 
they came at the bottom of the den.' " Where Lear 
prays that "cadent tears" may fret his daughter's 
cheeks, Steevens appends the following note. "Ce- 
dent tears ; that is, jailing tears. Doctor Warburton 
would read candent." "More fool Warburton;" said 
Macaulay. 

In the Second Act of Midsummer Night's Dream 
Oberon bids Puck remember — 

"Since once I sat upon a promontory. 
And heard a mermaid, on a dolphin's back, 



32 THE MARGINAL NOTES OF 

Uttering such dulcet and harmonious breath 
That the rude sea grew civil at her song; 
And certain stars shot madly from their spheres 
To hear the sea-maid's musick." 



Warburton maintained that Mary Queen of Scots was 
the mermaid, "to denote her beauty, and intemperate 
lust;" that the dolphin was Mary's husband the 
Dauphin of France; that the rude sea was "Scotland, 
encircled by the ocean;" and that the stars, which 
shot from their spheres, were those great English 
noblemen who had espoused Mary's quarrel. "I do 
not," wrote Macaulay, "believe that Shakspeare 
meant any allusion to Mary Queen of Scots. If he 
did, he was a very bad courtier; for he has alluded 
only to her charms, and suppressed all allusion to her 
vices. Who ever heard of the licentiousness of mer- 
maids? And, as to the dolphin, the Dauphin had 
been king of France, and had been dead, many years 
before any of the stars shot from their spheres in con- 
sequence of Mary's fascinations. I allow that War- 
burton's theory is ingenious." Later on in Midsum- 
mer Night's Dream, in an ironical mood, he directed 
the attention of the commentators to an historical 
blunder on the part of the poet. When Hippolyta re- 
lates how she had once been out hunting with Hercules 



LORD MACAULAY 33 

and Cadmus, Macaulay says: "Cadmus had been 
turned into a snake some generations before Hercules 
was bom. This may be added to the list of Shak- 
speare's anachronisms." In the Fifth Act of the play 
he made some amends to Warburton. 

"Now the hungry lion roars, 
And the wolf beholds the moon." 

"As 'tis the design of these lines," wrote Warburton, 
"to characterise the animals, as they present them- 
selves at the hour of midnight ; and as the wolf is not 
justly characterised by saying that he beholds the 
moon, which other beasts of prey, then awake, do; 
and as the sounds, which these animals make at that 
season, seem also intended to be represented, I make 
no question but the poet wrote : 

'And the wolf behowls the moon.' " 

"In my opinion," said Macaulay, "this is one of War- 
burton's very best corrections." The passage in the 
same play, where Theseus describes how even "great 
clerks" sometimes break down over their orations in 
the presence of their sovereign, and how their confu- 
sion affords a more flattering proof of loyalty than 

"the rattling tongue 
Of saucy and audacious eloquence," 



34 THE MARGINAL NOTES OF 

pleased Macaulay as much as it pleases every true 
Shaksperean. "This," he wrote, "is Shakspeare's 
manly sense, and knowledge of the world, introduced 
with perfect dramatic propriety. How different from 
Euripides's lectures on such subjects!" The verses in 
the Fourth Act, 

"Be, as thou wast wont to be. 
See, as thou wast wont to see. 
Dian's bud o'er Cupid's flower 
Hath such force and blessed power," 

he calls "beautiful and easy beyond expression." 
And on the last page he writes: "A glorious play. 
The love-scenes Fletcher might perhaps have written. 
The fairy scenes no man but one since the world began 
could have written." 

Shakspeare's Roman dramas had an especial at- 
traction for Macaulay. Never was a great scholar so 
Httle of a pedant. He knew that what Shakspeare 
could teach him about human nature was worth a 
great deal more than he himself could have taught 
Shakspeare about Roman history and Roman institu- 
tions. He was well aware how very scanty a stock of 
erudition will qualify a transcendent genius to pro- 
duce admirable literary effects; and he infinitely pre- 
ferred Shakspeare's Romans, and even his Greeks, to 



LORD MACAULAY 35 

the classical heroes of Ben Jonson, and Addison, and 
Racine, and Comeille, and Voltaire. Of the conver- 
sation in the street between Brutus and Cassius, in 
the First Act of Julius Caesar, Macaulay says: "These 
two or three pages are worth the whole French drama 
ten times over;" and, in his Httle essay at the end of 
the play, he writes, "The last scenes are huddled up, 
and affect me less than Plutarch's narrative. But the 
working up of Brutus by Cassius, the meeting of the 
conspirators, the stirring of the mob by Antony, and, 
(above all,) the dispute and reconcihation of the two 
generals, are things far beyond the reach of any other 
poet that ever hved." He frequently notices the art 
with which the dramatist turned to account the most 
slender materials. When Julius Caesar expressed his 
preference for having those about him 

"That are fat; 
Sleek-headed men, and such as sleep o' nights;" 

"Plutarch's hint," (said Macaulay,) "is admirably 
expanded here." When Steevens reminds the reader 
that Cleopatra's story of the salt fish on Antony's 
hook was taken from North's Plutarch, "Yes," says 
Macaulay, "but how happily introduced, and with 
what skill and spirit worked up by Shakspeare!" He 



36 THE MARGINAL NOTES OF 

keenly appreciated the unerring literary instinct wliich 
detected, and exhibited in enduring colours, the true 
character of young Octavius Caesar. "It is most re- 
markable," he writes, "that Shakspeare's portrait of 
Augustus should be so correct. Through all the flat- 
tery of his eulogists, it is easy to see that he was exactly 
the crafty, timid, cold-blooded man that he is repre- 
sented here." 

Coriolanus was a favourite play with Macaulay; 
and all the more because it related to a period of his- 
tory about which, in his view, Shakspeare knew just 
as much, and as little, as his learned commentators. 
With reference to the passage where the Tribune 
Sicinius spoke of the Senate as "our assembly," War- 
burton wrote: "He should have said your assembly. 
For till the Lex Attinia, — the author of which is sup- 
posed by Sigonius, (De Vetere Italiae Jure,) to have 
been contemporary with Quintus Metellus Macedoni- 
cus, — the Tribunes had not the privilege of entering 
the Senate, but had seats placed near the door on the 
outside of the house." "Absurd!" said IMacaulay. 
"Who knows anything about the usages of the Senate, 
and the privileges of the Tribunes, in Coriolanus's 
time?" War hurt on took still greater exception to the 
speech of Coriolanus as reported by the Third Citizen. 



LORD MACAULAY 37 

" 'I would be Consul,' (says he,) 'Aged custom, 
But by your voices, will not so permit me. 
Your voices therefore! " 

"This," observed the Bishop, "was a strange inatten- 
tion. The Romans at this time had but lately changed 
the Regal for the Consular Government; for Corio- 
lanus was banished the eighteenth year after the ex- 
pulsion of the kings." "Well!" wrote Macaulay; 
"but there had certainly been elective magistracies in 
Rome before the expulsion of the kings, and there 
might have been canvassing. Shakspeare cared so 
little about historical accuracy that an editor who 
notices expressions, which really are not grossly inac- 
curate, is unpardonable." In the same scene Brutus 
says of Coriolanus 

"Censorinus, darling of the people, 
And nobly named so, twice being Censor, 
Was his great ancestor." 

Warburton justly remarks that the first Censor was 
created half a century after the days of Coriolanus. 
Shakspeare, (he explains,) had misread his author- 
ities, and had confounded the ancestors of Coriolanus 
with his posterity. "This undoubtedly was a mis- 
take," said Macaulay; "and what does it matter?" 
On the last page he writes: "A noble play. As usual. 



38 THE MARGINAL NOTES OF 

Shakspeare had thumbed his translation of Plutarch 
to rags." 

"With regard to Cicero as an author," (so Nie- 
buhr wrote,) "I cannot say anything better than was 
said by Quintilian,^ — that the pleasure which a man 
takes in the works of Cicero is the standard by which 
we may estimate his own intellectual culture." It 
was a test which Macaulay was qualified to pass; for 
he read Cicero's works twice during those three years 
at Calcutta when he was reading Plautus four times, 
and Demosthenes thrice. It was all a labour of love. 
Macaulay read Greek and Latin for their own sake, 
and not in order to use them for purposes of literary 
copy. He has left us eight pages, as fascinating as 
any that he ever penned, about the Phalaris contro- 
versy in the Essay on Sir William Temple; and six 
pages, on the same topic, in the short article on Bishop 
Atterbury. These twelve or fifteen paragraphs, and 
the prefaces to the Lays of Ancient Rome, are the sole 
visible fruit of the thousands of hours which he spent 
over the classical writers during the last thirty years 
of his life. His manuscript notes extend through the 
long range of Greek authors from Hesiod to Athenaeus, 
and of Latin authors from Cato the Censor, — through 



LORD MACAULAY 39 

Livy, and Sallust, and Tacitus, and Aulus Gellius, 
and Suetonius, — down to the very latest Augustan 
histories. They testify to his vivid and comprehen- 
sive knowledge of the facts, dates, and personages of 
the ancient world. That knowledge was acquired, 
not at second hand from the dissertations of other 
scholars, but by strenuous and enraptured study of 
the original books themselves. Macaulay had always 
in his head the materials, and the thoughts, for an 
Essay on Greek and Roman history which might have 
ranked with the Essay on Clive, and with the article 
in the Encyclopaedia Britannica on William Pitt. But 
it was not so to be ; and a Life of Pericles, or a Life of 
Cicero, are among the unwritten biographies which 
were buried with him under the pavement of Poet's 
Corner in the transept of the Abbey. 

Cicero's philosophical writings were among the 
productions of their own class which Macaulay read 
with the greatest profit to himself. He was favour- 
ably disposed towards Cicero's viewz on the crucial 
problem of the foundations of morality; for he was 
an Academician so far as he was anything. Those 
two parallel lines in pencil, which were his highest 
form of compliment, are scored down page after page 
of the De Finibus, the Academic Questions, and the 



40 THE MARGINAL NOTES OF 

Tusculan Disputations. "Exquisitely written, grace- 
ful, calm, luminous, and full of interest; but the Epi- 
curean theory of morals is hardly deserving of refu- 
tation." That sentence relates to the first book of 
the De Finibus; and for Cicero's exposition of the 
Stoic theory, as apart from the theoiy itself, he has 
nothing but commendation. It is "Trashy sophistry, 
admirably explained;" or "Beautifully lucid, though 
the system is excessively absurd." "Fine anointing 
for broken bones!" he writes, when we are told that 
the sage, whose child has died, grieves for the possi- 
bilities of happiness which his child has missed, and 
not for his own loss. "Does not a man feel grief," 
(Macaulay asked,) "when he sends his favourite son 
to India?" He placed Cicero's treatises on oratory 
altogether above anything that ever had been writ- 
ten in that department of literature. He greatly ad- 
mired the theological disputations, and the discussions 
on omens, prodigies, and oracles. He pronounced the 
first book of the De Natura Deorum "Equal to any- 
thing that Cicero ever did;" and he esteemed the De 
Divinatione, (and how could he do otherwise?) as 
among the most curiously interesting of human com- 
positions. Cicero's argument against the credibility 
of visions and prophecies, in the Second Book of the 



LORD MACAULAY 41 

De Divinatione, is double-lined in Macaulay's copy. 

That eloquent display of scepticism, on the part of 

the most famous and learned professional soothsayer 

that ever lived, was in his mind when he read Ben 

Jonson's Catiline. 

''Lenhdus. The Augurs all are constant / am meant. 
Catiline. They had lost their science else." 

"The dialogue here," wrote Macaulay, "is good and 
natural. But it is strange that so excellent a scholar 
as Jonson should represent the Augurs as giving any 
encouragement to Lentulus's dreams. The Augurs 
were the first nobles of Rome. In this generation 
Pompey, Hortensius, Cicero, and other men of the 
same class, belonged to the college." 

Macaulay had a special liking for the De Officiis, 
and was in general agreement with Cicero's doctrine 
of duty; although he protested vehemently whenever 
the author thought fit to draw his examples of the just 
man made perfect from Scipio Nasica and Lucius 
Opimius, — the pair of worthies who murdered the 
brothers Gracchi.' My uncle regarded the De OfKciis 

' That was after Cicero had become a partisan of the aristocracy. As 
late in the day as his oration on the Agrarian Law he spoke of Tiberius 
and Caius Gracchus as "two most illustrious men of genius, who were 
among the very best friends of the Roman people." "I believe," wrote 
Macaulay, "that when Cicero was adopted into the class of nobles, his 
tastes and opinions underwent a change, like those of many other poli- 
ticians." 



42 THE MARGINAL NOTES OF 

as a young man's model for Latin prose composition. 
When I first went to Cambridge he solemnly enjoined 
me to read it during mathematical lecture, and thereby 
involved me in a scrape which I had long reason to 
remember. Even for Cicero's poetry Macaulay had 
enough respect to distinguish carefully between the 
bad, and the less bad. Whatever that praise may be 
worth, he characterises the translations from ^schylus 
and Sophocles in the Second Book of the Tusculan 
Disputations as "Cicero's best." He enjoyed and 
valued Cicero's Letters to a degree that he found dif- 
ficult to express. The document wliich he most ad- 
mired, in the whole collection of the correspondence, 
was Caesar's answer to Cicero's message of gratitude 
for the humanity which the conqueror had displayed 
towards those political adversaries who had fallen into 
his power at the surrender of Corfinium. It con- 
tained, (so Macaulay used to say,) the finest sentence 
ever written. "Meum factum probari abs te, trium- 
pho, gaudeo. Neque illud me movet quod ii, qui me 
dimissi sunt, discessisse dicuntur ut mihi rursus bellum 
injerrent ; nihil enim malo quam et me mei similem 
esse, et illos sui." ' Opposite that sentence appear the 
words: "Noble fellow!" 

'"I triumph and rejoice that my action should have obtained your 



LORD MACAULAY 43 

Macaulay's pencilled observations upon each suc- 
cessive speech of Cicero form a continuous history of 
the great orator's public career, and a far from un- 
sympathetic analysis of his mobile, and singularly 
interesting, character. The early efforts of the young 
advocate were mainly directed to the defence and 
rescue of quiet citizens from the rapacity and cruelty 
of Sulla's partisans. Of the oration on behalf of 
Quintius, delivered when Cicero was only six and 
twenty, Macaulay writes: "I hke this speech better 
than any of the Greek speeches in mere private cases. 
It would in any age produce a prodigious effect on any 
tribunal. It would seem that the confusion of the 
times, and the speedy ways of getting rich which the 
proscriptions had opened to cupidity, had destroyed 
all feehng of honour and honesty in many minds." 
He considered the oration for Roscius of Ameria, 
with its exposure of the villanies perpetrated by Sulla's 
freedman, the infamous Chrysogonus, as more credit- 
able to Cicero's heart than any that he ever made. 
"I cannot," he said, "help thinking that he strength- 
ened the language after Sulla's resignation. But, 

approval. Nor am I disturbed when I hear it said thai those, whom I have 
sent off alive and free, will again bear arms against me ; for there is noth- 
ing which I so much covet as that I should be like myself and they like 
themselves." 



44 THE MARGINAL NOTES OF 

after making full allowance for re-touching, it is im- 
possible to deny that he performed a bold service to 
humanity and to his country. Si sic omnia!" With 
regard to the first, and shorter, oration against Verres, 
Macaulay remarks: "There is great force about this 
speech. Cicero had not attained that perfect mastery 
of the whole art of rhetoric which he possessed at a 
later period. But on the other hand there is a free- 
dom, a boldness, a zeal for popular rights, a scorn of 
the vicious and insolent gang whom he afterwards 
called the boni, which makes these early speeches more 
pleasing than the later. Flattery, — and, after his 
exile, cowardice, — destroyed all that was generous 
and elevated in his mind." Of the Third Section of 
the Second Oration he says: "A very powerful speech 
indeed. It makes my blood boil, less against Verres 
than against the detestable system of govemrfient] 
which Cicero was so desirous to uphold, though he" 
himself was not an accomplice in the crimes whicK 
were inseparable from it." 

It was Macaulay's fixed belief that the debate on 
the punishment of the Catilinarian conspirators was a 
fateful crisis in Cicero's history. Caesar had almost 
persuaded the Senate to refrain from sending Roman 
citizens to a violent and illegal death, when Cicero the 



LORD MACAULAY 45 

Consul, — in an evil hour for his fame, and still more 
for his happiness, — raised his voice against the policy 
of clemency and self-control. "Fine declamation:" 
said Macaulay. "But it is no answer to Caesar's ad- 
mirable speech. This was the turning point of Cicero's 
life. He was a new man, and a popular man. Till 
his Consulship he had always leaned against the Op- 
timates. He had defended Sulla's victims. He had 
brought Verres to justice in spite of strong aristocrat- 
ical protection. He had always spoken handsomely 
of the Gracchi, and other heroes of the democratic 
party. He appears, when he became Consul, to have 
been very much liked by the multitude, and much 
distrusted by the nobles. But the pecuHar circum- 
stances in which he now was placed rendered it his 
duty to take the side of the aristocracy on some im- 
portant questions. He supported them on the Agra- 
rian Law. He also took vigorous measures against 
Catiline. They began to coax and flatter him. He 
went further. He was hurried by adulation, vanity, 
and vindictive feeling into a highly unconstitutional 
act in favour of the nobles. He followed, with more 
excuse indeed, the odious example set by Scipio Nasica 
and by Opimius. From that time he was an instru- 
ment in the hands of the grandees, whom he hated 



46 THE MARGINAL NOTES OF 

and despised: and who fully returned his hatred, and 
despised, not his talents indeed, but his character." 
Cicero, and his new political allies, had very little in 
common. At a serious crisis in Roman history he 
told Atticus that the leaders of the aristocratic party 
cared nothing about the ruin of the Republic as long 
as their fish-ponds were safe, and beUeved themselves 
to have attained celestial honours if they had great 
mullets which came up to be fed by hand. "These," 
said Macaulay, "are your boni !" and on a later occa- 
sion my uncle remarks, in caustic language, on the 
circumstance that the most creditable act of Cicero's 
official career was his effort to protect the miserable 
provincials of Cyprus from the cruelty and rapacity 
of no less a Senator than Marcus Brutus. Cicero's 
opinion of the nobles went steadily down as his expe- 
rience of them grew more intimate. The time came 
when he confided to Atticus that they were altogether 
insupportable. "I cannot endure," he said, "to be 
the object of their sneering talk. They certainly do 
not merit their name of boni." "You have found it 
out at last!" wrote Macaulay.* 

That was the precise point at which Cicero's use- 
fulness as a statesman and a patriot declined, and his 

* Cicero to Atticus; Book II. Letter i; VI. i; IX. 2. 



LORD MACAULAY 47 

misfortunes began. His nerve and courage were im- 
paired, and he surrendered his poHtical independence 
to bolder and stronger men. "Caesar and Pompey," 
said Macaulay, "liked Cicero personally, it should 
seem; but they saw that he was inclined to disturb 
their coalition. Accordingly they let Clodius loose 
upon him; connived at his being banished; fairly 
frightened him; and when they now saw that he had 
been rendered thoroughly tractable, they recalled him 
home. The struggle in poor Cicero's mind between 
fear and self-importance is one which all his great 
powers are quite unable to disguise." Under cruel 
pressure, from both Pompey and Cssar, Cicero was 
reluctantly induced to appear in court on behalf of 
Gabinius — a man, (so he complained to Atticus,) 
whose presence in the Roman Senate was a personal 
disgrace to all his colleagues.' "After having stooped 
to defend Gabinius," wrote Macaulay, "he might well 
bear to sit with him." "My motive," (Cicero once 
said in pubHc,) "for defending Gabinius was the de- 
sire to make up the quarrel between us; for I never 
repent of behaving as if my enmities were transient, 
and my friendships eternal." "A fine sentence," 
(said Macaulay,) "quoted very happily by Fox. But 

' Cicero to Atticus, X. 8. 



48 THE MARGINAL NOTES OF 

poor Cicero was ready to sink into the earth with 
shame, though he tried to put a good face on the mat- 
ter." "Meanwhile," said Macaulay, "it is easy to 
perceive that the vice of egotism was now rapidly 
growing on Cicero. He had attained the highest 
point of power which he ever reached, and his head 
was undoubtedly a little turned by his elevation. 
Afterwards this vile habit tainted his speaking and 
writing, so as to make much of his finest rhetoric 
almost disgusting. He gave himself airs, on all occa- 
sions, which, as Plutarch teUs us, made him generally 
odious, and were the real cause of his exile." My 
uncle describes the speech for the poet Archias, with 
its exquisitely worded encomium on the delights of 
literature, as a magnificent composition, blemished as 
usual by insufferable egotism. "What unhappy mad- 
ness," he says, "led Cicero always to talk of himself?" 
And of the attack of Piso in the Senate he writes, "A 
splendid invective certainly, but he was really mad 
with vanity." "The defence of Sextius is very inter- 
esting. Indeed those parts of the speech, which seem 
most out of place in a forensic address, are historically 
the most valuable. Cicero doubtless knew that his client 
was safe, and that the judges were all Optimates; and 
so he ventured to luxuriate in narratives and disquisi- 



LORD MACAULAY 49 

tions not very closely connected with the subject." 
The tribute of adulation which, in the course of that 
speech, the orator paid to the degenerate aristocracy 
of the later Republic angered his reader as he seldom 
had been angered by any passage in Uterature. When 
Cicero asked what sort of men were these Oplimates, 
who so well deserved their honourable title, Macaulay 
repHed that they were "the murderers of the Gracchi, 
the hirehngs of Jugurtha, the butchers of Sulla, the 
plunderers of the provinces, the buyers and sellers of 
magistracies, — such men as Opimius, and Scaurus, 
Domitius Ahenobarbus and Caius Verres.'" 

In his comments on the Epistles to Atticus Ma- 
caulay's sympathy with their author is more conspicu- 
ous than in his comments on the Speeches. When 
Cicero confesses, at the end of a letter the contents of 
which otherwise do him little credit, that the loss of 
his reader Sositheus, whom he calls a charming lad, 
had distressed him more than the death of a slave 



• While Macaulay was severe upon these ancient Romans, he did not 
spare himself whenever he had been betrayed into an error of literary 
judgment. He makes these two successive entries with reference to the 
oration for Marcus Marcellus. 

"A splendid and highly finished declamation; but, taken in connection 
with Cicero's letters written at the time, it does little honour to his charac- 
ter. September 27, 1835." 

"It does him neither honour nor dishonour. For it is not his. March 
17. 1856" 



50 THE MARGINAL NOTES OF 

might be thought to justify, Macaulay writes: "A 
kind-hearted man, with all his faults," When the 
unhappy ex-Consul complained that he had been 
rudely expelled from on board the ship of state, and 
relegated against his will, and before his time, to the 
haven of literary leisure; "Poor fellow!" said Ma- 
caulay. "He had not the firmness to do what he 
felt to be necessary for his peace." And when the 
darkness gathered round Cicero, and a sense of im- 
pending danger filled the air; — when Atticus was ab- 
sent from Rome, and amidst a crowd of flatterers and 
clients he had not a single friend with whom he could 
exchange a word of confidence; and when he found 
comfort nowhere except in the privacy of family life, 
with his darling Tulliola, and his "sweet little Cicero"; 
— the narrative of his sorrows and anxieties seemed 
to Macaulay "As exquisitely beautiful a passage as 
ever was written." The melancholy letters sent home 
to Atticus from Illyria and Macedonia during the 
period of Cicero's banishment suggested the following 
reflections to the English statesman at Calcutta. 
"Poor fellow! He makes a pitiful figure. But it is 
impossible not to feel for him. Since I left England 
I have not despised Cicero and Ovid for their lamen- 
tations in exile as much as I did." That was a curi- 



LORD MACAULAY 51 

ous illustration of character in the case of a brilliant 
and successful man of four and thirty, who had gone 
to India for a very few years in order to secure a com- 
petence, and fill a most important and dignified office. 
When Cicero tells his friend how, on his return from 
exile, he was welcomed home by the entire population 
of the city, "That day," said Macaulay, "was indeed 
worth a life to a man so sensitive, and so passionately 
fond of glory." In the Twelfth Letter of the Ninth 
Book is the passage commencing, "Cneius Pompeius 
is blockaded by a Roman army. He is enclosed, and 
held captive, within a wall of circumvallation built by 
Roman hands. And I live, and the city stands! And 
the Praetors dehver their judgments, and the ^diles 
prepare to hold the public games, and wealthy men 
calmly reckon up the value of their investments!" 
"Very fine writing, certainly;" Macaulay says. "I 
like some of the letters in this book as much as any of 
Cicero's compositions." ' 

After Caesar's death Cicero emerged from a period 
of retirement and irksome silence; and the third and 
last phase of his oratory commenced. Macaulay 
styles the Second Philippic "a most wonderful dis- 
play of rhetorical talent, worthy of all its fame." 

' Cicero to Atticus, I. 12; II. 7; I. 18; III. 13; IV. i. 



52 THE MARGINAL NOTES OF 

With regard to the Third Philippic he writes: "The 
close of this speech is very fine. His later and earlier 
speeches have a freedom and an air of sincerity about 
them which, in the interval between his Consulship 
and Caesar's death, I do not find. During that inter- 
val he was mixed up with the aristocratical party, and 
yet afraid of the Triumvirate. When all the great 
party-leaders were dead, he found himself at the head 
of the state, and spoke with a boldness and energy 
which he had not shown since his youthful days." 
Macaulay did full justice to Cicero's vigour and elo- 
quence at this grave political conjuncture; but he con- 
demned his course of action, and deeply disapproved 
his motives. "His whole conduct," he writes, "was 
as bad as possible. His love of peace, the best part 
of his public character, was overcome by personal 
animosity and wounded vanity." At the end of the 
last Philippic Macaulay compares him with Demos- 
thenes, whom he ranks above him as an orator. "As 
a man," he writes, "I think of Cicero much as I al- 
ways did, except that I am more disgusted with his 
conduct after Ceesar's death. I really think that he 
met with little more than his deserts from the Trium- 
virs. It is quite certain, as Livy says, that he suffered 
nothing more than he would have inflicted. There is 



LORD MACAULAY 53 

an impatience of peaceful counsels, a shrinking from 
all plans of conciliation, a thirst for blood, in all the 
Philippics, which, (whatever he may say,) can be at- 
tributed only to personal hatred, and is particularly 
odious in a timid man." 

That Tully met with his deserts at the hands of 
the Triumvirs is a hard saying; but his actions and 
his utterances, during the last years of his life, were 
repugnant, and sometimes even shocking, to Macaulay. 
Caesar had shown himself a kind and considerate 
friend to Cicero, and Cicero had professed gratitude 
and esteem for Caesar; but, after Caesar's murder in 
the Senate-house, Cicero exulted over his fate in 
words as sharp and cruel as the dagger of Cassius. 
Antony, again, had urged Cicero to lay aside ancient 
enmities, and secure for himself a tranquil and hon- 
ourable old age as the crown of his splendid career. 
"I only wish," answered Cicero, "that you had ad- 
dressed me face to face, instead of by writing; for you 
might then have perceived not by my words alone, but 
by m.y countenance, my eyes, and my forehead, the 
affection that I bear to you. For, — as I always loved 
you for the attentions you have shown me, and the 
services you have done me, — so, in these later days, 
your public conduct has been such that I hold no one 



54 THE MARGINAL NOTES OF 

dearer than you." That was how Cicero wrote to 
Antony; but, before a year was over, he thus v/rote 
abcnit Antony to one of Caesar's assassins : "Would to 
heaven you had invited me to that noble feast which 
you made on the Ides of March ! No remnants, most 
assuredly, would have been left behind. * * * I have 
a grudge even against so good a man as yourself when 
I reflect that it was through your intervention that this 
pest of humanity is still among the hving." "Infa- 
mous!" wrote Macaulay. "Compare this with his 
language about Antony before their quarrel." 

None the less did Macaulay regard Cicero as 
among the foremost men of all the ages. I remember 
papng him a visit in his rose-garden at Campden Hill, 
— as pleasant a comer of the earth as any that Marcus 
Tullius himself possessed at Tusculum, or Antium, or 
Arpinum. I was in a hurry to communicate to him 
my discovery of the magnificent verses in which Ju- 
venal bids observe how the world's two mightiest 
orators were brought by their genius and eloquence 
to a violent and tragic death. I can almost repeat 
Macaulay's exact words. "It is," he said, "very fine 
satire; but there is another aspect of the question. A 
man cannot expect to win great fame without running 
great risks and perils. In spite of all that Juvenal 



LORD MACAULAY 55 

says, Cicero and Demosthenes would never have con- 
sented to renounce their place in history in order to 
be sure of dying quietly in their beds. " ' 

Macaulay read Plato in a ponderous folio, sixteen 
inches long by ten broad, and weighing within half an 
ounce of twelve pounds; — which was very near the 
weight of a regulation musket at the period when he 
himself was Secretary of War. Published by ISIar- 
siHus Ficinus at Frankfort in the year 1602, it con- 
tained nearly fourteen hundred closely printed pages 
of antique Greek type, bristling with those contrac- 
tions which are a terror to the luxurious modern 
scholar. The Latin translation, arranged in parallel 
columns by the side of the original text, presents an 
aspect of positively revolting dullness. The blank 
spaces of this grim volume are lit up by Macaulay's 
comments, sparkling with vitaHty and fire, but some- 
times softened and awed into a strain of touching 
beauty. The Timasus, the Parmenides, and others of 
the more abstruse dialogues, appear to have interested 



•Macaulay read Latin authors in the Bipontine edition of 1781, and 
Greek authors in Dindorf's collection. His books contained nothing 
except the text; for, on whatever language he was engaged, whether ancient 
or modern, he had a profound aversion to explanatory notes. I cannot 
tell how much use he had made of a Lexicon. At that period of liis life 
when he read with me the Plutus of Aristophanes, the Midias of Demos- 
thenes, and the Gorgias of Plato, he knew the meaning of every word. 



■ QFq, 



56 THE MARGINAL NOTES OF 

liim little; for, greatly as he loved Plato, it was not 
chiefly for the sake of Plato's metaphysics. But at 
any pitched battle between Socrates, and a tough op- 
ponent, Macaulay assisted in a spirit of joyous exhil- 
aration which people seldom bring to the perusal of a 
philosophical treatise. The Euthydemus, in particu- 
lar, is enlivened throughout by his exclamations of 
amusement and delight. "It seems incredible that 
these absurdities of Dionysodorus and Euthydemus 
should have been mistaken for wisdom, even by the 
weakest of mankind. I can hardly help thinking that 
Plato has overcharged the portrait. But the humour 
of the dialogue is admirable." "Glorious irony!" 
"Incomparably ludicrous!" "No writer, not even 
Cervantes, was so great a master of this solemn ridi- 
cule as Plato." "There is hardly any comedy, in any 
language, more diverting than this dialogue. It is 
not only richly homourous. The characters are most 
happily sustained and discriminated. The contrast 
between the youthful petulance of Ctesippus, and the 
sly, sarcastic mock humihty of Socrates is admirable." 
There are personal touches among the annotations on 
the Euthydemus. To Plato's rather grudging de- 
scription of the man of the world, who is likewise a 
man of the study, and who divides his time between 



LORD MACAULAY sj 

philosophy and politics, Macaulay appends the re- 
mark: "Dulcissima hercle, eademque nobilissima 
vita." And, below the last line of the dialogue, there 
occurs the following entry: "Calcutta, May 1835. 
Yesterday the London News of the 2nd of March 
arrived by steamer from Bombay. Peel beaten in 
two divisions. Suave mari magno— " 

Macaulay read the Republic with the eyes of a 
Whig and an Englishman; but, whatever he might 
think of Plato's poHtical and social ideals, he had a 
deep and abiding admiration for Plato himself. 
"Plato," Macaulay wrote, "has been censured vnth. 
great justice for his doctrine about the community of 
women and the exposure of children. But nobody, 
as far as I remember, has done justice to him on one 
important point. No ancient politician appears to 
have thought so highly of the capacity of women, and 
to have been incUned to mahe them so important. He 
was to blame for wishing to divest them of all their 
characteristic attractions; but, in return, he proposed 
to admit them to a full participation in the power and 
honour enjoyed by men." When the philosopher 
enjoins the inhabitants of his Utopia to treat a great 
poet with profound reverence, but to get him outside 
their community at all hazards, — to anoint his head 



58 THE MARGINAL NOTES OF 

with precious unguents, and crown him with garlands, 
and then pass him on as soon as possible to some 
neighbouring city, — Macaulay remarks: "You may 
see that Plato was passionately fond of poetry, even 
when arguing against it." Where Plato recommends 
a broader patriotism as a corrective to the fierce and 
narrow municipal sentiment of the small Greek states, 
"this passage," he writes, "does Plato great honour. 
Philhellenism is a step towards philanthropy. There 
is an enlargement of mind in this work which I do not 
remember to have found in any earlier composition, 
and in very few ancient works, either eariier or later." 
There was, (said Macaulay,) something far beyond 
the ordinary political philosophy of Greece in that 
fine definition of the object for which civil government 
should exist,— "the relief and respite of mankind 
from misfortune." Of the striking conception of ab- 
stract justice, in the Second Book of the RepubHc, he 
writes: "This is indeed a noble dream. Pity that it 
should come through the gate of ivory!" The Eighth 
Book, in the judgment of the great critic, was above 
and beyond all detailed criticism. "I remember," he 
says, "nothing in Greek philosophy superior to this 
in profundity, ingenuity, and eloquence." 

Macaulay rated the Protagoras exceedingly high 



LORD MACAULAY 59 

as a work of literary art. "A very lively picture," he 
wrote, "of Athenian manners. There is scarcely any- 
where so interesting a view of the interior of a Greek 
house in the most interesting age of Greece."' "Cal- 
lias seems to have been a munificent and courteous 
patron of learning. What with sophists, what with 
pretty women, and what with sycophants, he came to 
the end of a noble fortune." "Alcibiades is very well 
represented here. It is plain that he wants only to 
get up a row among the sophists." "Protagoras 
seems to deserve the character he gives himself. Noth- 
ing can be more courteous and generous than his 
language. Socrates shows abundance of talent and 
acuteness in this dialogue; but the more I read of his 
conversation, the less I wonder at the fierce hatred 
he provoked. He evidently had an ill-natured pleas- 
ure in making men,— particularly men famed for 
wisdom and eloquence, — look like fools; and it would 
not be difficult, even for a person of far inferior powers 
to his, to draw the ablest speculator into contradic- 
tions upon questions as subtle as those which he loved 
to investigate. Protagoras seems to have been a man 
of great eloquence and accomphshments, though no 

* When the porter slammed the door in the face of Socrates, with the 
observation that his master was busy, "A more sincere, and a less civil, 
answer," said Macaulay, "than our 'Not at home.'" 



6o THE MARGINAL NOTES OF 

match for Socrates at Socrates's own weapons. It is 
plain from many passages that this dialogue, if it be 
not altogether a fiction, took place about thirty years 
before the death of Socrates. Pericles seems to have 
been still living. Alcibiades was hardly arrived at 
manhood. I should think, from one or two expres- 
sions, that the Peloponnesian war had not yet begun. 
I can hardly suppose this, and the other dialogues in 
which Socrates is introduced, to be purely fictitious. 
Some such conversation took place, I imagine. Soc- 
rates had often related in Plato's hearing what had 
passed; and this most beautiful drama, for such it is, 
was formed out of those materials." 

At the commencement of the Gorgias is written: 
"This was my favourite dialogue at College. I do 
not know whether I shall Hke it as well now. May 
I, 1837." Macaulay followed the cut-and-thrust of 
the controversy with brisk attention. " Polus is much 
in the right. Socrates abused scandalously the ad- 
vantages which his wonderful talents, and his com- 
mand of temper, gave him." "You have made a 
blunder, and Socrates will have you in an instant." 
"Heml Retiarium astutumi" "There you are in the 
Sophist's net. I think that, if I had been in the place 
of Polus, Socrates would hardly have had so easy a 



LORD MACAULAY 6i 

job of it." When Callicles, the unscrupulous and 
dexterous votary of politics and pleasure, took up the 
foil, the exchanges came quick and sharp. "What a 
command of his temper the old fellow had, and what 
terrible, though delicate, ridicule! A bitter fellow 
too, with all his suavity." "This is not pure morahty; 
but there is a good deal of weight in what Callicles 
says. He is -ftTong in not perceiving that the real 
happiness, not only of the weak many, but of the able 
few, is promoted by virtue. The character of Callicles 
throws great hght on that fine diagnostic of Thucydides 
on the state of political morality in Greece during the 
contest between the oligarchical and democratic prin- 
ciples. When I read this dialogue as a lad at college, 
I thought Callicles the most wicked wretch that ever 
lived ; and when, about the time of my leaving college, 
I wrote a trifling piece for Knight's Magazine, in which 
some Athenian characters were introduced, I made 
this Callicles the villain of the drama.' I now see 
that he was merely a fair specimen of the public men 
of Athens in that age. Although his principles were 
those of aspiring and voluptuous men in unquiet 
times, his feelings seem to have been friendly and 

•Scenes from "The Athenian Revels," January 1824. The little drama, 
together with its sister piece, "The Fragments of a Roman Tale," maybe 
found in the Miscellaneous Writings. 



62 THE MARGINAL NOTES OF 

kind." His warning to Socrates, (added Macaulay,) 
about the perils which, in a city like Athens, beset a 
man who neglected politics, and devoted himself ex- 
clusively to philosophical speculation, was well meant, 
and, as the event proved, only too well founded. 

Macaulay unreservedly admired the glorious rhap- 
sody which ends the dialogue. "This," he wrote, "is 
one of the finest passages in Greek literature. Plato 
is a real poet." "These doctrines of yours," (said 
Socrates to Gorgias and Callicles,) "have now been 
examined and found wanting; and this doctrine alone 
has stood the test, — that we ought to be more afraid 
of wronging than of being wronged, and that the prime 
business of every man is, not to seem good, but to be 
good, in all his private and public deahngs." That 
sentence was marked by Macaulay with three pencil- 
lines of assent and admiration. "This just and noble 
conclusion," he writes, "atones for much fallacy in 
the reasoning by which Socrates arrived at it. The 
Gorgias is certainly a very fine work. It is deformed 
by a prodigious quantity of sophistry. But the char- 
acters are so happily supported, the conversations so 
animated and natural, the close so eloquent, and the 
doctrines inculcated, though over-strained, are so 
lofty and pure, that it is impossible not to consider it 



LORD MACAULAY 63 

as one of the greatest performances which have de- 
scended to us from that wonderful generation." 

When Socrates was put upon his trial, he reminded 
the Court, in the course of his celebrated defence, how 
he had braved the popular fury by refusing to concur 
in the judicial murder of the Ten Generals; and how, 
at the peril of his life, he had silently disobeyed the 
unjust behests of the Thirty Tyrants. Macaulay 
pronounced that portion of the speech to be as inter- 
esting and striking a passage as he ever heard or read. 
When Socrates expressed a serene conviction that to 
die was gain, even if death were nothing more than an 
untroubled and dreamless sleep, "Milton," said Ma- 
caulay, "thought otherwise. 

' Sad cure ! For who would lose 
Though full of pain, this intellectual being; 
These thoughts that wander through eternity.'" 

I once thought with Milton; but every day brings me 
nearer and nearer to the doctrine here laid down by 
Socrates." "And now," said the condemned crim- 
inal to his judges, "the time has come when we must 
part, and go our respective ways, — I to die, you to 
live; and which of us has the happier fortune in store 
for him is known to none, except to God." " A. most 



64 THE MARGINAL NOTES OF 

solemn and noble close!" said Macaulay. "Nothing 
was ever written, or spoken, approaching in sober 
sublimity to the latter part of the Apology. It is im- 
possible to read it without feeUng one's mind elevated 
and strengthened." 

Phaedo relates how Socrates, on the last morning 
of his life, amused himself by recaUing his own youth- 
ful interest in the problems of natural science. "This," 
said Macaulay, "is what Aristophanes charged Soc- 
rates with, and what Xenophon most stoutly denied. 
The truth seems to be that the mind of that wonderful 
man, as he grew older, gradually turned itself away 
from physical speculations, and addicted itself more 
and more to moral philosophy. Aristophanes knew 
this probably before Xenophon was bom." Macaulay 
thus remarks on the beautiful legend about the puri- 
fication of souls in Acheron and Cocj1;us, vnth. which 
Socrates concluded his final talk on earth: "All this 
is merely a fine poem, like Dante's. Milton has bor- 
rowed largely from it; and, considered as an effort of 
the imagination, it is one from which no poet need be 
ashamed to borrow." When the master drank the 
poison, and when Apollodorus burst into a passion of 
weeping, and broke down in a moment the composure 
of the whole company of disciples, Macaulay says, 



LORD MACAULAY 65 

"This is the passage, I dare say, which Cicero could 
never read without tears. I never could. Phaedo 
tells a noble and most touching story. Addison 
meant to have written a tragedy on it. He would in- 
fallibly have spoiled it. The reasonings of Socrates, 
on his last day, convey no satisfaction to my mind ; but 
the example of benevolence, patience, and self-pos- 
session, which he exhibited, is incomparable and in- 
estimable." And again, on the last page of the Crito, 
he writes: "There is much that may be questioned in 
the reasoning of Socrates; but it is impossible not to 
admire the wisdom and virtue which it indicates. 
When we consider the moral state of Greece in his 
time, and the revolution which he produced in men's 
notions of good and evil, we must pronounce him one 
of the greatest men that ever lived." 



THE END 



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